The Coastie & The Cartographer | An Airstream Adventure

05 January 2015

Quilting "Autumn Moss"

Ugh, I'm almost a month behind with quilt blogging, but I have an excellent excuse: after spending only four months in the same state/country as my husband throughout the entirety of 2014, we got to spend the final two weeks of the year together—yay! As of today, he's now back with the Airstream in Washington state and I am in Maine for another few weeks ...

So ... backing up, between December sixth and thirteenth, when I was happily settled in at the Nova Scotia house, I quilted the third in a series of my mother's photographs: Autumn Moss. Previously, I quilted Fuchsia and Golden Light.

If you ever had a terrarium, this image might remind you of that tiny, soft moss that would happily live in it (mom found this bunch growing naturally in her backyard in Midcoast Maine). Here's the original image from her Flickr stream, and here's the quilt that I made from a fabric print of the image:

And here's a small glass print of the image with the quilt in the background. Clearly, the image loses much of its luminosity when printed on fabric, but I think that the addition of the texture created by the quilting makes up for it in a different sort of way.

Once again, the fabric print was made by Spoonflower via the Internet, and I paired it with a lovely mottled orange fabric and some brown and orange thread that I found at Avonport Discount Fabric Centre in Avonport, Nova Scotia.

I made this quilt somewhat more 3D by layering extra batting behind the most defined fronds of moss and then quilting the very edge of the moss with tiny orange stitches—to both attach the batting and give the moss further definition.

After I carefully cut away the extra fabric, I was left with two separate and three overlapping fronds.

After I made the quilt sandwich with the batting and backing fabric, I cut away a good deal of the excess so that I could more easily work with the quilt.

And then this is what I saw for the next couple of hundred thousand stitches or so—from one angle or another.

I had decided to follow the edges of the images in an echo pattern (and as it turns out, this type of quilting has a name and everything: echo quilting!), but I decided to do it at the eighth-inch, which as it turns out, is time-consuming, maddening, and uses a shit-ton of thread, both above and below; a number of additional trips to the fabric shop for additional thread were undertaken.

But I love how it came out. Not bad for a first attempt.

When I had finally finished the quilting a few arduous days later, I was sad to see so many stitches be cut away, but I wanted a squared-off quilt, and that's the trade-off.

I added a matching binding and stood back to see the result. It was by far the most thread-heavy and finicky quilt that I've ever made, but I like the result so much that I know I'll find a place for echo quilting again in my future ...

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Quilting "Autumn Moss"

Ugh, I'm almost a month behind with quilt blogging, but I have an excellent excuse: after spending only four months in the same state/country as my husband throughout the entirety of 2014, we got to spend the final two weeks of the year together—yay! As of today, he's now back with the Airstream in Washington state and I am in Maine for another few weeks ...

So ... backing up, between December sixth and thirteenth, when I was happily settled in at the Nova Scotia house, I quilted the third in a series of my mother's photographs: Autumn Moss. Previously, I quilted Fuchsia and Golden Light.

If you ever had a terrarium, this image might remind you of that tiny, soft moss that would happily live in it (mom found this bunch growing naturally in her backyard in Midcoast Maine). Here's the original image from her Flickr stream, and here's the quilt that I made from a fabric print of the image: